DITA for Crowds—How to Collect and Assemble Content From Multiple Experts

Collecting and assembling contributions from multiple authors into a single body of content poses unique challenges. Those problems multiply when your objective is to use multi-channel publishing. This is exactly what XML Press needed to do when it teamed with The Content Wrangler to create a content strategy book series. The series includes several books that collect term definitions from multiple contributors. To efficiently produce those books, we needed both a methodology and supporting technology that would allow a facilitator/editor to manage 52 contributors for each book. Also, XML Press and The Content Wrangler wanted to use this series as a showcase for different methods of managing multi-channel publishing.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler for this free one-hour webinar with his special guests Richard Hamilton, Publisher at XML Press, and Don Day. Together they will show how XML Press developed "The Language of Technical Communication" using expeDITA, a DITA-based wiki developed by Don. The expeDITA framework uses DITA as its native format but offers authors a forms-based interface that requires no knowledge of DITA. It provides the support needed to effectively manage contributions from many authors and ensure that those contributions can be used in multiple output channels.

Attendees can expect to learn:
• the challenges of providing a collaboration environment for multi-author works
• the risks and rewards of using structured content in a collaboration environment
• how we selected and adapted the expeDITA platform for this project
• how we applied the facilitator/contributor model on a per-project basis
• the lifecycle of a typical project, from proposal to marketing campaigns

Understanding content value is not only core to creating great experiences, it is core to creating profits from that content. However, measuring that value is thorny business. How do you define a good piece of content or know if it supports the experience you are trying to create? A core roadblock is not understanding how to measure but how to measure consistently. For example, what is the value of a retweet versus a forwarded email or a website visit or a webinar question?

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, James Goldman, Sr. Manager of Content Strategy at Equinix, for this free one-hour webinar. The webinar will cover the process of normalizing these measurements, making sense of KPI’s, and understanding the investment made in building digital experiences.

We have often heard Marketing and Operation teams (or supply vendors) are seeking ways to improve their communication with each other. There are business and personal advantages to bridging this gap. Marketing and Operations should see each other as partners and allies, not internal adversaries. Silos occur naturally when people work in a vacuum without understanding how their actions impact their other teams or their vendors. Silos are imposed by company structure or self-imposed by the employees themselves. Silos can also be caused by language barriers and cultural differences, or may be imposed for security reasons.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Erica Haims, for this free, one-hour webinar. Erica will delve into positive, helpful solutions that benefit everyone by addressing the issues created with Marketing vs. Operations—aka Creatives vs. Resource Suppliers. Erica will share ideas about bridging silos including things like having a liaison who can communicate across teams; sharing best practices between teams, groups, and partners; and creating training materials for on boarding that highlights information regarding your team.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the art and practice of managing digital media, and more specifically, non-textual assets such as images, brand logos, videos and all things visual. It’s important to understand both the practice & technicalities of DAM, and in particular, what DAM technology is and how it really works.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst and Managing Partner with the Real Story Group, for this free, one-hour webinar. Theresa will walk webinar attendees through the fundamentals of DAM functionality. This webinar is appropriate for those who are new to DAM or end-users of a DAM system who want to have a deeper understanding of the different things a DAM system can do. Theresa will explore DAM functions such as ingestion, storage management, media processing, transformation, transcoding, metadata management, monetization and rights management, workflow, and reporting. At the end of this webinar, you'll have a solid understanding of the core components of DAM success, how to make a business case for DAM, and how DAM fits into the bigger picture of marketing technology.

While single and all-inclusive messages to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) people can be quite effective, in many ways there is no "LGBTQ community." In some cases, the most authentic and productive connections are made when segments within the community are recognized and addressed. Some companies and organizations may be able to be all things to all LGBTQ people, and for those companies, a singular message may suffice. But for most, that approach will not yield maximum results.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guests from Community Marketing & Insights (CMI), for this free one-hour webinar. CMI President Tom Roth, and Research Director, David Paisley, will lead this discussion. Tom and David will inform participants about the differences within the LGBTQ communities from a research and outreach perspective, and how to successfully connect with the communities that present the best "match" for their products and services.

Webinar participants will obtain a high-level understanding of “LGBTQ” as a market; gain insights into nuanced differences within LGBTQ market segments; and learn how to authentically approach appropriate LGBTQ segments, and successfully leverage these opportunities into results.

Content strategists are critical to business success. In addition to helping organizations create relevant content, they often are called upon to help spot content production bottlenecks, improve authoring performance, detect existing content challenges, and develop plans for content overcoming content creation, management, and delivery challenges. They're the connective tissue between the organization, its content development teams, and the communication products provided to both prospects and customers alike.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Eeshita Grover, Senior Manager, Technical Communications at Cisco, for this free, one-hour webinar about the evolving role of the enterprise content strategist. Attendees will learn what makes a successful content strategist, how the role fits into an organization, and how content strategists can impact the customers they serve. Key takeaways include a discussion about the various skills required to become a content strategist, the tools necessary for planning a content strategy, and how to build buy-in for content strategy projects with upper-level management.

Your content, being a proxy for direct human interaction, needs to be authentic to reach its desired goals. But good luck trying to inject authenticity into the highly volatile team workflows that govern today's daily grind of sales, marketing, and public relations departments. Methods to make the recipient *believe* that content is authentic are like a crutch. Do not focus on creating authentic content. Instead, help your content creators become more authentic in what they do and who they are, and much of the rest will come naturally.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Mathias Maul, Chief Shrink at The Content Shrinks, for this free, one-hour webinar. You’ll gain valuable insights into your daily business operations that can help you devise and implement author-first workflows. You will learn how to coach your content teams to become the best at what they do and understand how to enhance communication between the various voices inside your content creators’ heads.

For many manufacturers, the service (aftermarket) business is currently growing at twice the rate of other business units. However, the cost of service is very high, and maintenance issues are often also managed inefficiently. In a traditional model, the service engineer would first need to make a trip to the site, inspect the problem, order spare parts, and go back a second time to perform the maintenance. Such a call may cost several hundred dollars. Research has found that it takes a service engineer up to 50% more time to troubleshoot an issue, as maintenance information is often out of date, or difficult to find, use or understand because delivery is in the form of complex, ambiguous, or poorly translated information in lengthy PDF files.

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) enables manufacturers to collect, analyze, and capitalize on machine data, which changes the whole process of service—from early detection for predictive maintenance, to maintenance as a service and an entirely new revenue stream.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Berry Braster, Sales Director of Technical Documentation Services at Etteplan, for this free, one-hour webinar. During this program, the discussion will center around how companies are adopting IoT to improve their service, reduce costs and downtime, and turn the customer experience into a center of excellence.

Attendees will learn what content creators need to know about IoT to help their business create new revenue streams; why content is a key element to predictive maintenance and service strategies; and how to make content more engaging to end users who are increasingly wanting an experience vs. the traditional model of content delivery.

We all know that an important aspect of content strategy is context: Who will see your content? Why will they care? On which device? On which platform? In what color and size? Narrated or text? The meaning, and often the attraction and retention of a message, relies heavily on context.

And now, with the gamut of simpler plugins, apps, and tools, we’re also managing motion. Or at least, we should be. Motion can come in many forms, from video to animation to responsive design. As content strategists, or people who manage content and effective communication, we can’t leave motion solely up to the designers and developers. With a little proactive planning and some collaboration, we can make motion support our content strategy.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Shelly Bowen, Chief Content Strategist for Pybop, LLC, for this free one-hour webinar. Shelly will discuss how to determine whether motion is supporting or distracting from your content strategy goals. She will give examples of how incorporating motion can improve experience and results, and help the audience to understand how motion can trigger an emotional response.

Agile development offers advantages. Short cycles, cross-disciplinary teams, frequent short meetings, and input from users can lead to satisfied customers and faster product delivery. Technical writing outsourcing is often late to the game–with other teams already globally distributed. Even when technical writers are co-located with developers, process issues can pose obstacles. For example, without a mechanism for notifying writers of user interface changes, accuracy suffers.

Can technical writing outsourcing work in an Agile environment, even if writers are off-shore and developers are not? Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, Barry Saiff, CEO of Saiff Solutions, and Fred Williams, CEO of Williams Technical, for this free one-hour webinar. Our presenters will discuss how innovative organizations are successfully merging technical writing outsourcing with Agile development.

You’ll learn the key steps to success in technical writing outsourcing, how outsourced writers integrate into Agile teams, and how to manage these approaches to improve quality, save time, and reduce costs.

Many people in the technical documentation and content management field may not be aware that there is an international ISO Standard for how a Component Content Management System is built and how its functionality conforms to best practices for content creation and management.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and his special guest, Casey Jordan, co-founder of Jorsek LLC, for this free one-hour webinar. As one of three co-authors of the standard (with Dr. JoAnn Hackos and Bob Boiko), Casey helped develop the standard that materially affects the way we utilize structured content in an enterprise or organization. The standard was developed to ensure interoperability between systems and file structures, and to ensure compliance with the open Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) that underlies most Component Content Management Systems.

Casey will discuss the benefits of working with a standard and how it drives contemporary content management practices and will demonstrate how workflows, authoring, editing, review, publishing, reuse, and localization are all driven by the guidelines set in the ISO standard.

You want to create videos for your customers, but it never seems like there's enough time to get started. Many people and organizations have faced the same demands, including the need to help customers succeed. The truth is, it's not your fault that you don't already have a video library full of content—the implementation is simply broken. What you need is a better way to get started.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Martin Ceisel, Technical Writer for ESET North America, for this free, one-hour webinar. In this webinar, Martin will share the lessons those in the ESET Knowledgebase have learned while implementing video over the last five years. Martin will share some tips on how you can get your stream of video content up and running in less time than you think, including how his company's initial plan to tackle the top issues with video has them on pace to surpass one million views by the end of 2016. Attendees will learn about some top video best practices; tips and techniques for enhancing “traditional documentation” with video; the case for doing (more) video; and how video can start a conversation with your customers.

Ever since we were kids, we’ve gotten scorecards. Every year teachers give us an “A,” “B” or—heaven forbid—a “C” on the quality of our work. When we move on to college prep, we take tests such as the SAT or ACT. Again, the end result is a scorecard. In the content arena, scorecards provide a way for us to assess how our content stacks up against certain criteria. For example, how closely aligned is our content to the style guide? How well does content follow the rules of governance? And how precise are our translations?

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest Val Swisher, CEO of Content Rules, as they talk about why content scorecards are necessary. Val will demonstrate how to use these scores to make crucial business decisions.

Customers and employees are happiest when they have context as well as content. Context requires a broad set of voices having one conversation. Too often, companies have initiatives in silos that yield duplicate, contradictory content that doesn’t serve the business' primary goals.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his two guest presenters, Laurel Nicholes, Director of Tech Comms Services at F5 Networks, and Niki Vecsei Harrold, Director, Community Strategy at Transamerica. In this real-world study, learn how one company built a Community Interlock across all areas of the business, including Marketing, Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Success. With a minimum time investment, the Interlock yields rich community content, programming, and a feedback mechanism to share customer sentiment cross-functionally. It also drives engagement in the community, where customers and employees collaborate.

The results? Customers get the information they need in a holistic way in one place. Marketing white papers relate to technical articles, which yield "Ask Me Anything" sessions. We create a knowledge arc that supports customers through their ownership lifecycle.

Precision Content is a series of methods and principles for structured authoring developed by Rob Hanna in 2013. This methodology is based on a well-known body of research founded in cognitive and behavioral sciences that theorizes that all structured information can be classified into one of a discrete number of information types. Each of these information types defines how the information is best structured and written to suit the intended reader response.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and his special guest, Rob Hanna, President of Precision Content for this free, one-hour webinar. In this session, Rob will guide you through an interactive exploration into how our brains work with information; explain how the Precision Content information types work to capture information used in any piece of business or technical content; discuss how Precision Content can help authors working with DITA/XML, and demonstrate how Precision Content is used to provide better clarity and precision to information.

You’ve heard plenty of talks about why visuals should be part of your content strategy. But videos, images, and GIFs are also super useful behind the scenes—in the content creation process itself.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Daniel Foster, Team Lead for TechSmith's SnagIt, for this session on using and creating better visuals. Daniel will share real-life examples and workflows that will save your team time and avoid rework—from planning to production, to publishing and beyond, and how to use visuals that can pump up your team’s productivity.

Attendees will learn how to speed up the content creation process, establish a shared vision during planning, reduce confusion and re-work by improving the review and the feedback loop, streamline publishing by documenting best practices, and how to connect stakeholders and internal audiences with your fabulous content.

Marketers have long thought about the emotions of their customers in relationship to selling products or service. However, human beings respond to all written information with their emotions. In fact, we use our emotions to make decisions and then maybe use data to support those decisions. This fact is true whether a customer is reading a bank statement, a marketing brochure, or terms and conditions for a credit card. Those of us who create content need to understand the types of emotions that engender trust and loyalty and how to write content that reinforces those emotions.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Deborah Bosley, Ph.D, Principal of The Plain Language Group, for this free one-hour webinar. Deborah will explain the connection between emotions and language and offer examples of content that empathize with customers to create true relationships and vital customer experience.

Technical Communication in high-tech is under pressure to perform—to reduce costs, to innovate, to delight, and to transform. Whatever the name of the division—whether it's Tech Docs, or Tech Pubs, or User Assistance, or Those Writers—it's a safe bet that decision makers do not understand the function or the possibilities that the function might fulfill. A quarterly focus on profit and expense means that budget assumes the most important discussion point, but is that the conversation you want to have?

Success doesn't just happen; you have to plan what you want to do and planning means you must talk to the people in your ecosystem, and listen to what they tell you, and you have to demonstrate that you have heard them and that your plans align with their overall plans. You have to plan to communicate properly—and often—and you have to plan in order to demonstrate that you know your business. Success comes in many different forms and planning is the first step to getting there.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Paul Perrotta, Senior Director of Information Experience / Solutions and Services for Juniper Networks and learn why TechComm is both vital and misunderstood. Topics in the discussion include how showing up at work isn't enough—that you must articulate a vision that aligns with the overall company or divisional goals; and learn why success does not just happen—you must plan for it to make it happen.

The DITA standard has fundamentally changed the way that the technical writing community thinks about structured authoring. With DITA, firms can benefit from content reuse, consistent messaging, lower localization costs, and much more. As an open standard, DITA is highly interoperable and comes with a mature set of tools bringing additional advantages over other formats.

This presentation focuses on the development of DITA and the tools that have evolved alongside it to effectively manage what may be vast quantities of technical content. The “10 Million DITA Topics” is a conservative estimate of the number of DITA topics some firms are managing within their component content management systems when one includes versioned content. This is not only being done efficiently, but the added flexibility provides process opportunities for intelligent content that were not previously available.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Keith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Information Architect with IXIASOFT as he examines the developmental roots of DITA, and how some of the original architectural decisions in DITA have opened a dialog as to the nature of effective technical communications. The talk will compare some of the key differences between DITA and other structured content formats, and delineate what makes a specification successful from a market and client perspective. Through the use of case studies, Keith will also examine how clients have leveraged these DITA features in practice.

The presentation will be of interest to technical writing managers and those who are trying to understand the ramifications of the success of DITA in the marketplace, and how it has changed ideas about how structured authoring can become intelligent content.

Collecting and assembling contributions from multiple authors into a single body of content poses unique challenges. Those problems multiply when your objective is to use multi-channel publishing. This is exactly what XML Press needed to do when it teamed with The Content Wrangler to create a content strategy book series. The series includes several books that collect term definitions from multiple contributors. To efficiently produce those books, we needed both a methodology and supporting technology that would allow a facilitator/editor to manage 52 contributors for each book. Also, XML Press and The Content Wrangler wanted to use this series as a showcase for different methods of managing multi-channel publishing.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler for this free one-hour webinar with his special guests Richard Hamilton, Publisher at XML Press, and Don Day. Together they will show how XML Press developed "The Language of Technical Communication" using expeDITA, a DITA-based wiki developed by Don. The expeDITA framework uses DITA as its native format but offers authors a forms-based interface that requires no knowledge of DITA. It provides the support needed to effectively manage contributions from many authors and ensure that those contributions can be used in multiple output channels.

Attendees can expect to learn:
• the challenges of providing a collaboration environment for multi-author works
• the risks and rewards of using structured content in a collaboration environment
• how we selected and adapted the expeDITA platform for this project
• how we applied the facilitator/contributor model on a per-project basis
• the lifecycle of a typical project, from proposal to marketing campaigns

Creating and managing great content is your job. Effective delivery of that content to your customers and prospects—on their terms—is a business imperative. As technical product content is increasingly recognized as an important asset for improved marketing and customer experience, we need to think in those terms, applying new best practices to enable better findability and discoverability of content. Integrating the long-tail value of product documentation with the short-term outlook of marketing campaigns is our challenge as a practice, thereby enabling greater business value around our content.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, the host for this free one-hour webinar. Scott will be joined by intelligent content guru, Joe Gelb, President of Zoomin Software, Frank Miller, President and CEO of Ryffine, and Megan Gilhooly, Sr. Manager Content Management for Amazon Seller Support. This round-table discussion will provide an overview of how to move beyond publishing and Web Content Management to dynamic content delivery and a cross-touchpoint digital experience.

The Content Wrangler Channel covers the people, methods, tools and technologies designed to help you deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right device, in the right format and language. Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.